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RUCHO v. COMMON CAUSE
KAGAN, J., dissenting
tional districting requirements). The effect is to make
gerrymanders far more effective and durable than before,
insulating politicians against all but the most titanic
shifts in the political tides. These are not your grandfather’s—let alone the Framers’—gerrymanders.
The proof is in the 2010 pudding. That redistricting
cycle produced some of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in this country’s history. I’ve already recounted
the results from North Carolina and Maryland, and you’ll
hear even more about those. See supra, at 4–6; infra, at
19–20. But the voters in those States were not the only
ones to fall prey to such districting perversions. Take
Pennsylvania. In the three congressional elections occurring under the State’s original districting plan (before the
State Supreme Court struck it down), Democrats received
between 45% and 51% of the statewide vote, but won only
5 of 18 House seats. See League of Women Voters v. Pennsylvania, ___ Pa. ___, ___, 178 A. 3d 737, 764 (2018). Or go
next door to Ohio. There, in four congressional elections,
Democrats tallied between 39% and 47% of the statewide
vote, but never won more than 4 of 16 House seats. See
Ohio A. Philip Randolph Inst. v. Householder, 373
F. Supp. 3d 978, 1074 (SD Ohio 2019). (Nor is there any
reason to think that the results in those States stemmed
from political geography or non-partisan districting criteria, rather than from partisan manipulation. See infra, at
15, 31.) And gerrymanders will only get worse (or depending on your perspective, better) as time goes on—as data
becomes ever more fine-grained and data analysis techniques continue to improve. What was possible with paper
and pen—or even with Windows 95—doesn’t hold a candle
(or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning. And someplace along
this road, “we the people” become sovereign no longer.